


Forest Castles

by yvesdot



Category: Forest Castles, Original Work
Genre: F/M, Fantasy, Isekai, M/M, Multi, New Adult, Novel, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-26 17:37:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15668031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yvesdot/pseuds/yvesdot
Summary: Kidnapped by a sentient forest, stubborn and mildly lovelorn (but she didn't tell you that) Eliza Feldman works to combine her talents of seduction with her need to meddle in absolutely everything to enjoy herself as best she can in the land of slackers and attractive men... temporarily. Only temporarily. There's an evil queen in there, after all.[genre: new adult / fantasy / romance][mature rating is on for subject matter and excessive swearing; nothing explicit. pg-13.]





	1. Chapter 1

_in which I do and say many strange things, none of which warrant being kidnapped_

 

I am talking to myself. And I am not just talking to myself, I am talking to a shrub. Of course, I’m speaking in the smallest voice possible, so as not to be pegged as a complete weirdo, but all the same, I am gossiping about my classmates to the clump of dandelions I am trying to photograph.

 

“I _really_ don’t get,” I say, adjusting the aperture, “how they can just ‘avoid homework, on principle.’ Do they not care about grades? Are they rich? Do they just—”

 

I always stop talking when I have the shot lined up perfectly. Because then it would ruin the photo.

 

“— _not care??”_ I finish, looking through about fifteen shots of the same flower. And then twenty of another one, somewhere off to my left. And there are a couple of photos of another flower that I found in a puddle, but those flowers are going to be Photoshopped blue for a _‘moody effect’._ My teacher loves those; she’s a wedding photographer with a side job teaching kids to take photos of plants.

 

Technically, I could be taking portraits right now, or I could be dicking around—we’re allowed to go pretty much anywhere in the school to take photos, which naturally means a lot of goofing off from the aforementioned homework-intolerant students. Unfortunately, it does not mean goofing off for me, because I am a normal person who happens to have an unbelievable amount of anxiety about just... fucking around while a perfectly normal teacher thinks I’m doing my job. God. And then what, I lie to her about how class went? I’d rather die.

 

Five seconds later, I’m back on my bullshit, this time with a rock. It is substantially less animate than the flowers, which I try not to think about.

 

“It’s like they _don’t—care,”_ I repeat, trying to get an angle that makes the rock look sad. I’ve tried happy photos, but nobody’s going to buy that. What people want is the most depressed landscape photo possible, and fortunately, I know a lot about depressed landscapes. I lie down on my side to get the shadow. “And I guess some of them don’t _have_ to care, but are they really just _fine_ with—the idea of not—” I take six consecutive shots, each slightly different from the last, and forget what I’m talking about. Then I sit up.

 

I’m out behind the school, in what could possibly be called a field if you really wanted to and had never been to the state of Washington before. Somehow, I’m alone again, though I know for a fact that this is the only place, other than the front of the school (which trains a lot of eyes on you), that has anything interesting to photograph. I can’t imagine what other people are snapping during this block. The cafeteria? Their hands?

 

“Juan is the only one who actually knows how to use the studio, so _he’s_ all set,” I mutter, this time mostly into the air. Then I flick some grass stems and try to get a nice shot of them blurred. My handful of Instagram followers are going to absolutely lose their shit over this, if I can find a caption properly absent of all originality or opinion. I look up and stare, as annoyedly as I can, into the woods.

 

Right, my school has a woods.

 

To clarify: we have The Woods. Nothing quite as Twilight-esque as what we _could_ have, and what we probably deserve, but full of enough trees that you can actually call it The Woods and not look like an ass. Other things you can do in there: ask someone out, have sex (this one’s a rumor), skip class, get-slash-give a blowjob (this one’s confirmed), go and take photos.

 

If... you are really, really desperate, and you’re starting to not care that, a little while ago, they decided that campus does not extend to the woods and therefore students should not go over there to do _lawless things!!!_ then you may enter the woods. Potentially. To take photos.

 

“Which begs the question,” I mutter, snatching a shot of a tree branch with a weird nest on it, “why do they think that people who go into the woods to fuck during school hours are going to _stop_ doing that because they put another rule in the books?” I scroll through the camera’s memory, but it doesn’t want to capture the nest properly. I lower the aperture.

 

“‘Oh, whoops,” I say, leaning in closer, “‘sorry, you’re so soul-drenchingly hot that I was _going_ to ditch Calculus AB to go have at it with you, but we’d better find somewhere else than the woods to do it because that’s _against school rules??”_ I get twelve more photos closer, further away, and also in the same general area. Then I lower the aperture again. “The dedication to fucking that lets you go into the grimy, dirty, pine-needle-covered woods and do it _on the ground, covered in dirt_ alone should imply a certain disregard for obstacles.”

 

This goes on for a while. The gist of it is that I think it’s stupid that we’re not allowed to go in the woods and it’s a pointless rule and my last boyfriend was kind of dumb in the same general region because he was like, we can’t make out in the public bathroom because it’s a _public bathroom, Eliza,_ and I was like, but nobody’s in it and there’s no line outside and it’s a single stall, and he was all _but I care what people think about me_ and that, among other things, was why I dumped him. I have dumped a lot of people; I like to think I am a woman of quality.

 

But that’s not what I’m thinking about when I go into the woods. It’s tangentially related to what I _was_ thinking about when I was taking a photo of a knot of wood on a tree—“and it’s _not_ that I care if she has sex with, like, the entire school—even though how can you—do that—when there’s only so many people in school _anyway—_ why was I even listening when she told me that—” but now I am thinking two things:

 

  1. Who really gives a shit about this assignment? Do _I_ give a shit about this assignment? Definitely not, so who really does? Does _anyone_ care about this? Because maybe my teacher will give me an A or tell me the school musical is still looking for photographers to make them a poster, but my parents sure as hell don’t have time to care, and besides for that, what am I going to do with this once my actual _life_ starts? Will I even have money to buy a camera? Am I going to do this on the side when I have an office job? How is this supposed to mean anything in my actual life, outside of my stupid hobbies? God, I hate being depressed. 
  2. I’ll be gone fifteen minutes; nobody is going to miss me.



 

And so I walk in. And I look around a bit, and take some more photos—mostly those nice leafy shots where you’re looking up at the sky through all the branches—and keep walking forward. I know the rough dimensions of the woods; I’ve been in them after school. They’re maybe two hundred feet across; I’m sure I won’t get lost.

 

That means I’m really surprised when I get lost.

 

It happens slowly. I walk forwards, and I take little detours to photograph daisies and dandelion poufs on the way. I guess I notice at some point that there are more trees than I thought, but that happens a lot—more homework than I thought, more school than I thought, more time ‘til the end of the day than I thought—so I guess I brush it off. And when it gets to be too late to brush it off, I turn around.

 

There’s nothing but trees behind me. For miles and miles on every side of me, there’s nothing but trees.

 

I have no idea where I am.


	2. Chapter 2

_ in which i lose my way and find an untrustworthily attractive man _

 

Right now, I figure I have two options: Move, and eventually find somewhere to be and somewhere to eat and some way to get out of here, or not move—and, you know, eventually starve to death. Having skipped breakfast, I’ve got a head start.

 

Everyone knows that the first thing you do to get your bearings is find a landmark, so I go for that first. It’s difficult, mostly because everything looks the same around here—green and vaguely mossy, occasionally crawling with ladybugs. These trees are not the ones I had back at my school; I know that for sure. The ones back there were shrubby, odd-looking; they were bedraggled and bent slightly in different places.

 

These trees don't look like that. At least, not exactly.

 

A long time ago, I watched some old foreign film in a class. It was Russian, and subtitled something awful, and the whole thing seemed to be about brown-haired girls with big doe eyes running into beautiful burly men in the forest. The trees were strong, thick, and piney; you could tell that anything that tried to hurt those trees could be smothered right out of existence. Those were trees that were proud to be trees, if you know what I mean.

 

Well.

 

What I’m trying to say is that these are those trees—but off, slightly. I can’t put my finger on it, but every so often I  _ will  _ see a shrubby tree. Or one that’s bent. Or one that’s losing some of its needles. It feels like a diorama of my woods made by someone who isn’t sure exactly what they look like.

 

Once I’ve established that everything looks the same, I try using the moss to my advantage. You know, how it always faces North? Well, this moss doesn’t, which is something I find after checking several different trees, all mossed in different directions.

 

So, you know. I’m going to die out here, walking into oblivion for eternity.

 

Strangely enough, the walking itself doesn’t actually bother me. Usually I’m not one for running or jumping or exercise really whatsoever (hence photography, hence fear of not getting into college), but this is as simple as sitting down. I keep going, hoping for some change, and it doesn’t feel very long at all before I get to a signpost.

 

_ RED CASTLE,  _ it says.  _ WHITE CASTLE. VILLAGE OF THE PINES. MOSSVILLE. MARINA’S CAMPGROUND. CARNIVAL. NIXIE POND. MERMAID POOL. FLOWER TOWN. _

 

It says all of these things, each on its own arrow, and every arrow is pointing the exact same way. 

 

I spend a moment looking at it, anyway, because I’ve never heard of anywhere called  _ MOSSVILLE  _ and I think I kind of like it. Then again, it would be nice to meet someone as human-sounding as Marina. Or maybe I want to find out if there are actual nixies, or mermaids, or if this is some kind of tourist trap.

 

“You’re not a real sign, are you,” I say, prodding it. It’s very wooden. “You don’t have any point at all. Well, I’ll show you. I’m going to Red Castle.”

 

And after taking exactly five steps in the direction of the arrow, I look to my right and there it is. Actually, it’s roughly where the arrow used to be—except the arrow isn’t there anymore, and now it looks like I’ve just walked out of a random spot in the woods. I would sit down, only my head is spinning too much to sit, so instead I focus on the nearest object, which happens to be the castle.

 

It  _ is _ red. It’s a sort of burgundy-red, with white windows, and it kind of reminds me of those photos of fog-clouded mansions people take in Maine. There are towers, too, though it’s not shaped like the square wooden castle my siblings have at home. Red Castle is oddly thin-looking, and the entire front side is obscured by hedges and roses and smaller bushes of plants I can’t begin to identify.

 

I realize, suddenly, that I want to take a photo of it. I know I can’t take photos of architecture, but I still want to try. The clearing, first—somehow catch a snip of the soft green grass. Then the maze of hedges and lilies and flowered arches leading up to what might be a door. And then the castle itself. I want to at least make an attempt.

 

So I lift my camera up, thinking it can’t be as hard as it inevitably turns out to be every time, but the thing beeps irritably at me and refuses to turn on. Which is just evil, because I was so sure this was the camera that handled its battery well. Hell, I checked this morning. Camera 6; that’s my camera. I shake it kind of irritably and sigh. It has a lanyard on it, so I put it around my neck (like some kind of geek, I know, I know) and look ahead. No backpack, I guess. No camera.

 

Wow, I am so fucked!

 

Fortunately, I’m fucked in a pretty fun way—I mean, I’m in a mysterious forest, and it's the kind of thing I would peg as magic if I were hearing about it. I’m still kind of unable to digest that feeling of actually being in one of those situations that sound like a fairytale—minus the fairies, I guess. This is going to be so cool to tell people when I get back.

 

I am dangerously close to realizing that I still haven’t gotten any closer to getting back when I see the guy.

 

He’s standing in front of a rosebush; it strikes me that he’s the only person outside. Not that it’s bad so much as weird—I look up at the windows, but I can’t see anyone there, either. It’s just the guy, who is holding a rose between his second and third fingers and deeply considering it. After a moment, he takes out a knife and just cuts the whole thing off its stem. He examines it, apparently satisfied, then moves to get another one.

 

“Hi,” I say, and start walking in his direction. He looks at me very curiously.

 

“You’re new,” he says, and I wait until I get all the way up to him to say, “what?”

 

“You’re new to the forest,” he repeats, and hands me the rose. “Hold this,” he says, once I’m already holding it and therefore unable to refuse. He cuts off another one. “Do you think I want a white one, or should I just focus on the reds for now?”

 

“My mother hates roses,” I say, since we’re speaking in non sequiturs. “She thinks they’re a waste of money; you stick them in water and they die instantly.”

 

“Your mother is right,” he agrees, and snips off a couple more. Then he pauses, and goes for the white ones anyway. “This will be poetic,” he assures me, and turns back to snip at them. I wait for him to get a decent handful.

 

He’s very pretty. Renaissance-style; the sort of guy who is  _ technically  _ handsome, but also looks a little unreal. I guess I like a sharp jawline in a man. Also a sharp nose, as it happens. Most of his face looks like you could slice butter with it, which is a weird thought but something I’m sticking by nonetheless. It’s unfortunate that he’s dressed like he’s going to the funeral of a grunge-punk 19th-century prince, but that can be overlooked... Of course, it’s also unfortunate that his hair is somehow dyed black (brown eyebrows, a dead giveaway) with white and red streaks, which is much more difficult to overlook, seeing as the whole thing sort of hits you in the face visually. And he has a messenger bag, also black, which is probably full of severed hands. My mom would hold her purse closer around him, but then again; I’m not my mom. 

 

He has nice nails, at least. 

 

“Coincidentally,” he says, while I methodically remove thorns from my rose, “I was just heading out.”

 

“Out?” I say, pricking myself. “Ow.”

 

“Out,” he repeats. “Of the castle. Of the forest.” He looks in the general direction of the gates and frowns. “And I want to be out of here, specifically, in the next five minutes, so feel free to tag along or—” he waves his hand indicatively, but eventually gives up—“not.”

 

“What are my other options?” I ask. This is less disconcerting now that I have definitive things I can do about it. Actually, it’s possible I’m in shock, but I can take care of that once I figure out how to get out of here. And that’s what I’m doing right now, so no need to worry.

 

“Right. You can come with me,” he says, listing off on his fingers, “or you can go indoors to the palace—” he points with two fingers, which looks weirder the more I pay attention to it—“you can find your own way to the White Castle, you can find your own way out of here, you can get lost, you can die slowly... Six seems like a bad number to end on. I feel like I should end on a seven or a five, maybe a ten, but not a six. Six seems like a bad number, dramatically.”

 

“Can I get a unicorn here?” I offer. I don’t feel like I’m getting the hang of this properly.

 

“No,” he says, after a moment, “not that I know of, but I think if the Queen sees you talking to me and does some sixth-grade math relating to me wanting to leave and you wanting to leave, you can count on either being killed or permanently imprisoned. And that’s—no, that’s eight. Not dramatically helpful either.” He sighs, and apparently struggles with something deep and internal—“I don’t have time to give you the explanation now; you’ll figure it out as you go. Please come with me.”

 

Pause. Consider.

 

Option number one: Potentially escape with both honest- and dishonest-seeming man. He’s hot, which is a plus, and he might be fucking with me, which is a minus, and he has a weird sense of humor, which is a definite... multiplication sign. Actually, I’m not sure what those are called. Either way, what I mean is that it really just amplifies the situation.

 

Option number two:  _???? _

 

Option number one might lead me into severe and terrible trouble, but apparently I might die if I stay here, and if it’s between possible death with hot guy versus possible death without, I’ll take the hot guy and worry about the consequences later.

 

I take the guy’s arm with my camera hand. Then I realize I’m holding a stranger’s arm, so I smile beguilingly at him, because I might as well be an untrustworthy stranger, too. He looks surprised and off-put, which is a good start to things.

 

“Are you interested in my knowing your name?” he asks, which is such a weirdly-phrased sentence that I have to take some time to decode it. While I’m working on that, he takes my rose.

 

“Yes,” I say, “and Eliza Feldman.”

 

“Very Jewish,” he says. “I like it.”

 

“Your name?” I ask, and he says, “Red.”

 

Doesn’t sound Jewish. On the other hand, he  _ looks  _ distinctly Jewish, so I guess I’ll have to chalk it up to bad taste in names.

 

“Is this about your hair?” I guess, because those red streaks are hard to ignore. 

 

“No, it’s because I’m uncreative and part of the Red Court,” he says. “And it’s not my real—”

 

“Take my camera,” I say, and hand it to him. He turns it around in his hands for a moment before carefully inserting it into his bag. He bundles his roses together with a rubber band he definitely didn’t have a moment ago, wraps them with paper he  _ definitely  _ didn’t have a moment ago, and tosses them in as well. Then he shakes everything a bit roughly (I wince—those cameras cost $500 to replace) and zips it all up. He turns to look at the castle, frowns significantly harder than he did the last time, and starts running.

 

Important thought about suddenly being pulled into a run: It hurts your arm. If that’s what’s being held, I mean; I guess a leg or ear would hurt just as much. He has longer legs than me (I’m not a good height estimator, but I’m 5’6 and he’s got me beat by some inches, so let’s just say it’s in the legs), and it’s painful to observe.

 

At an objectively arbitrary point in our jog, Red yanks me  _ (ow)  _ behind a tree.

 

“I think we’ve gotten somewhere,” he says. “Hopefully. I don’t actually know how you’re affecting my time.”

 

“Ouch,” I say, and attempt to climb up after him. He seems to have some kind of magical grip going on with his boots; mine just slide off the bark no matter how I try. “I was going as fast as I could.”

 

“Appreciated,” he says, reaching up to swing himself over a branch, “but not the point. Here—” and he lowers his hand for me to grab onto. I use him as a kind of leverage—he wobbles a bit, but manages to keep his grip on the branch he’s holding—to get myself nearer to where the trunk splits, and then I scramble over to the other side of the tree. It curves up nicely at my back; I can face Red pretty comfortably. As the case may be—his eyes are still hard to place, in terms of the area between handsome and creepy.

 

“Okay,” he says, “crash course on the forest.”

 

“It’s got trees,” I say.

 

“Ha. You’re going to get stabbed,” he says, and stands up. I clutch my branch a little harder; he rummages around in the leaves obscuring his face. “Listen to me if you want to survive.”

 

“I honestly just want to find my way back to school,” I say, and he keeps rustling. 

 

“Apparently  _ not,”  _ he says, still obscured by foliage, “because you’re not at school. You’re here. And you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need-slash-want to be here. You want to eat something?”

 

“Um—sure,” I say, mostly because I’m hoping it’ll get him out of the tree. But also, well, sure, as long as he hasn’t poisoned it. I had a waffle in a Ziploc bag in my backpack, and I miss it.

 

Red chucks a pear-colored orb at me, and I turn it over in my hands. It’s soft—I worry that holding it too hard will bruise it, like a peach—and it smells strange. Unnatural, like sweet perfume.

 

“Okay,” he says, dropping back into his position leaning against the branch of the tree. He’s got his own little pear-orb, though it’s smaller. I watch him pull out his knife (and suddenly realize that, wait, he  _ has  _ a knife, and aren’t those banned from school grounds for a reason) and start slicing the fruit by hand.  _ In  _ his hand, too; I can tell he sees me staring. “If I make a mistake, I might cut off a finger,” he says, and starts whistling off-key.

 

Show-off: another minus sign.

 

“I don’t know how to eat this,” I say, kind of sounding like an idiot, “and I probably won’t if it’ll get juice on my hands.”

 

“Then have it sliced,” he says, tossing me a piece. I miss, naturally, and it lands on the ground below us. He sighs. “There are children starving in Africa, Eliza...”

 

“I have bad aim,” I say. “Regardless of whether or not there are starving children involved; I’m a creative type. Baseball is for the athletic types.”

 

“Are there still children starving in Africa, by the way?” Red asks, leaning back a little further. He tosses one fruit-slice at his face and misses grabbing it with his teeth; he barely catches it in one hand. “Been a while since I’ve been in the real world.”

 

“You’re not nearly cute enough to be making sense right now,” I say, and just bite into the fruit thing on its own. It’s sort of sour at the edges; not as juicy as I expected, but it is soft. When I look over the edge of the pear-fruit-thing, Red is covering up his apparent pain by inserting slices wholly into his mouth, one at a time. “So. Forest? Real world? Different places?”

 

Red holds up his hands and demolishes the fruit in his mouth before swallowing. I wait while he considers his remaining pear (?) slices. He folds his hands and thinks. Some birds chirp, and I wonder if they’re normal birds. A long moment passes before he looks up at me.

 

“Yes,” he says. I wait. He says nothing else.

 

I was not mean enough to deserve that. I open my mouth to say so, too, but he shushes me and climbs further up the tree, disappearing somewhere in the higher branches.

 

“Don’t tell them I’m here,” he hisses, and I’m about to ask what he’s talking about when I see the soldiers.

 

They’re not really soldiers—at least, they don’t really  _ look  _ like them. But they look organized, and adult, and each of them looks distinctly armed, and there’s clearly a leader with a small, cosplay-esque official hat; a teenager with a long, dark ponytail. She looks up at me, squinting.

 

“You alone in there?” she calls. I nod. She frowns at me, and turns her head; her eyes flash in the sunlight. She’s wearing all black, but the face honestly spoils the look. She’s too soft.

 

Then she nods, and turns around. Her gang seems to have dissipated into the woods, and after another glance at me, she follows them. I wait a moment before scrambling lower down the tree to get a look.

 

“Wow,” I say, and it takes me a second to realize that Red’s squirreled his way down beside me. “What the hell was  _ that?” _

 

“Something you wouldn’t see in the real world,” Red answers. There’s a distinct pause in which I think about the LARPers who made a playground out of my local park last year; swords and all. “At least, not with normal people. Here, that’s normal.”

 

“Two things,” I say. “First: oh, joy. Second: you’re dressed exactly like them, plus dyed hair and emo clothes, so I wouldn’t be talking.”

 

“They’re not  _ emo,”  _ he says, and frowns so hard I think I can hear it.

 

“Then back to everything else: oh joy, and you’re just like them.”

 

“Well, first of all, you’ll enjoy yourself here for a little while, and second of all,  _ everyone  _ dresses according to what’s normal. I notice you’re wearing shoes, and they’re not on your head, so ha.”

 

“I’m wearing shoes because I want to keep my feet clean and safe, like a  _ normal person _ . Meanwhile, you look like a middle school production of Sweeney Todd, so—” I wave at him. He’s close enough that I hit him in the nose a little.

 

“Ow,” he says, rubbing his face. “Physically  _ and  _ emotionally.”

 

“So if I’m not at school, assuming I believe that, then where am I and how do I get home?”

 

“Well, you’re in the forest—”

 

“Ooh, ten points to Gryffindor—”

 

“Not ‘the forest’,  _ The Forest,”  _ he says, “and you leave—well—” He pauses. “I’ll show you how you leave if you come along with me. I’m bored, lonely, and at least one other thing I can come up with later that human company will cure, so if you go along with me down to the White Castle and collect my—Avner—I’ll... figure out whatever you want me to figure out, getting out of here-wise.” 

 

He sort of waves his arms and loses it a bit at the end, but I think I get what he’s saying. He can maybe get me out of here, if I accompany him for...

 

“How long would this take?” I ask. He shrugs.

 

“Maybe three days. Maybe a year. Maybe I’ll get caught again and the Queen will decide to cut off your head.” I open my mouth, and he puts a hand up, leaning back against the tree again. “But if you ask anyone else, it might take longer. So—what’ll it be?”

 

“I...” I don’t have a choice. It’s either go with him or waste more time trying to find someone else; I’m a sitting duck for whatever kind of creepy soldiers are finding their way through here. Which brings me to my next point: “Why  _ is  _ the Queen after you? Is she not going to—” I wave my hand illustratively—“me, too?”

 

“She thinks she owns me, because she thinks she owns everything, and definitely, if she catches us and connects some dots, but I don’t think she will. Next question?” Red smiles toothily. I don’t know if I like that  _ he  _ likes messing with me, but as it is, I don’t have many options.

 

“Are you telling me the truth?”

 

Red frowns. He cocks his head, and then looks away. When he looks back at me, I could swear his eyes are darker than they were before.

 

“You’ve got no reason not to trust me,” he says, but he doesn’t look happy about it. I shrug, and pull my knees up to my chest (a dangerous position this far off the ground).

 

“I’ve got no reason to trust you, either,” I say. Red smiles, and tilts his head the other way. His hair falls straight down, like water past rocks. “But I guess I’ve got no other options. Lead the way.”

 

I hold my hand out, and he seems to catch my drift—he jumps out of the tree  _ (hard  _ landing on his feet, but he hides it well) and reaches out to me. I take his hand, and he helps me down. Our free hands meet naturally.

 

He looks at me. I look at him.

 

At school, I don’t have an awful lot of paramours. I’ve got one most recent ex-boyfriend, several less recent ex-boyfriends and -girlfriends, and some cheerleaders who’ll never give me the time of day, but no current partner. Here—wherever  _ here  _ is—I’m pretty sure I can do what I want. Short-term. 

 

So: “I think I like you, Red.” I smile, and squeeze his hands. He lets go of my left hand, and bows to kiss the back of my right—good thing I met him here, because in the real world he’d  _ definitely  _ be a drama kid.

 

“I think I like you, too, Eliza.” Then he smiles, and I think there’s something dangerous in it. Fortunately, I don’t care.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're enjoying this work, please drop a comment by. I have been brainstorming, planning, writing, editing, and living in this world for four years, and any encouragement fuels me to continue.
> 
> Want more? Find me at [my blog](http://yvesdot.tumblr.com) and check out my [projects page](http://yvesdot.tumblr.com/projects), where you can see more about Forest Castles specifically as well. Excerpts and ask games abound! 
> 
> Chapter 2 will be posted on August 19th, 2018, and subsequent chapters will be posted in the coming year.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In Which Everyone Meets In A Coffee Shop, Because Of Course I Wrote This](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15875721) by [yvesdot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yvesdot/pseuds/yvesdot)




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